Pochamma

Pochamma

A village goddess, and a name whose etymology nobody has checked

Pochamma is a village goddess of Telangana, held to be among the most frequently worshipped of the state's village goddesses. The earlier revision of this file called her "the most worshipped folk goddess in Telangana" and derived the name from a word for vegetables. Both claims have been removed. The superlative is unproven and would require a survey nobody has conducted. The etymology is not supported by anything, and offering a guess at the derivation of a divine name is precisely the practice this corpus exists to stop. The name is left unexplained, which is the honest state.

What can be said is more useful than the etymology. Pochamma belongs to a dense and still-growing body of Telangana village goddesses — Peddamma, Yerramma and others — who are worshipped side by side and are often treated as a family or as rival powers with overlapping jurisdictions. Their relations are not settled: in some accounts they are sisters, in others they belong to separate lineages and a village may owe more than one of them, and in the large public festivals of the modern city they are increasingly presented as one goddess. A reader who meets one of these goddesses should assume there are four or five others in the next village, and that the relationships between them are a live local question rather than a settled doctrine.

Her office is protection of the village and of its people — health, and the ordinary unluck of a rural household, and the illnesses that a village has always had to manage without a hospital. This is the grāma-devatā institution in its clearest form: a deity whose jurisdiction is precisely the settlement, whose priesthood comes from the same community as the worshippers, and whose shrine is a local affair rather than part of any temple order.

The festival the earlier revision attached to her needs the same treatment. Bonālu is now a major public season in Telangana in which women carry decorated pots of cooked rice to the shrines, and it is the period in which several of these goddesses are worshipped together. It is not simply Dasara, though the two can overlap in some years, and the old file's parenthetical conflated a lunar month of temple-going with a festival of a different kind. A guardian with a local source should record which goddesses are brought together in Bonālu in which district, because the answer is not uniform.

Sources and what is still unverified

The Hyderabad and Rangareddy district gazetteers, and the gazetteers of the old Hyderabad state, are the starting point. A named study of Telangana village goddesses and of the Bonālu festival is the thing to add. The Encyclopaedia of the Hindu World (ed. Jones and Ryan) is a cross-check. Still unverified: the etymology of the name, the superlative claim, the identity of the shrine behind this entry, the festival calendar, and the relation to Peddamma and Yerramma. The previous revision's sources were the placeholders "Local tradition" and "Temple records", neither of which is a citation, and its description field carried machine markup as prose. Left .